Total War: Warhammer 2 – Curse of the Vampire Coast DLC review

Curse of the Vampire Coast was released on 8th Nov and adds a new style of play to the Total War: Warhammer 2 game. With an entire new faction, a new storyline, pieces of eight (which unlock regiments of renown) and treasure to find there is plenty to keep you interested for hours and hours. Spoiler alert: later in the article there will be a video of the final battle so if you don’t want to see that please skip, I’ll give you another warning nearer the time!

The Vampire Coast (VC) faction are Zombie Pirates and the entire story line is focused around finding the pieces of the fabled Star Metal Spear which is the only weapon capable of killing Amanar, the greatest Merwyrm ever to terrorise the seas.

You can check out the full Vampire Coast roster in the video below:

Not surprisingly there is a heavy Naval focus to this faction. You not only start the campaign with a city but also a flagship, which is essentially a second floating city, that can be upgraded in the same way as its land based counterparts. You can play the campaign in the more traditional sense taking the land route but by doing so you will miss out on some of the unique aspects of the faction. A nice touch for the VC is once you take a city you are given the option of establishing a pirate cove rather than taking over which delivers a steady stream of income without you having to worry about the other aspects of managing the city.

In terms of playstyle the VC are very missile heavy making them more of a defensive army. Whilst they do have some very capable melee troops they are quite pricey and you won’t be able to field many at a time. I found this quite tricky to get the hang of being used to playing as the more balanced High Elves but I would say this is more down to my lack of skill than there being anything wrong with the faction!

There are some fantastic new units being fielded by the VC, my favourite has to be the Queen Bess cannon which is capable of wiping out pretty much any unit in 1 or 2 hits. The bloated corpses which are essentially suicide troops can take out the strongest of units provided they can get in range and the new school of magic, the Lore of the Deep, has some especially destructive spells which probably need a bit of balancing. The towering Necrofex and Crab monsters also stand out in making this faction unique.

If you’ve already been playing TWWH2 and you like it then I can’t recommend this DLC enough. As mentioned it adds a new style of play and refreshes what can become an almost formulaic play style of simply taking city after city.

There isn’t much bad to say about the DLC at all, speaking as a fan of the base game. There are still the excruciating long waits between turns in the campaign, even pretty early on when you haven’t come close to discovering all of the factions, and long load times when going into battle for the first time (and this on a high spec PC) but other than these expected issues I can’t really fault anything.

Now for the spoiler, below is the final battle in the game where you’ve collected and assembled all of the pieces of the Star Metal Spear. If you don’t want to see it you’ve been warned! I should also humbly note that I lose this battle but will amend to one where I win if I ever actually manage to pull it off!